Hemingway's Boat

€ 19.95

From a National Book Critics Circle Award winner, a brilliantly
conceived and illuminating reconsideration of a key period in the life
of Ernest Hemingway that will forever change the way he is perceived
and understood.

Focusing on the years 1934 to 1961from
Hemingway's pinnacle as the reigning monarch of American letters until
his suicide Paul Hendrickson traces the writer's exultations and
despair around the one constant in his life during this time :his
beloved boat, Pilar.

We follow him from Key West to Paris, to
New York, Africa, Cuba, and finally Idaho, as he wrestles with his
best angels and worst demons. Whenever he could, he returned to his
beloved fishing cruiser, to exult in the sea, to fight the biggest
fish he could find, to drink, to entertain celebrities and friends and
seduce women, to be with his children.

But as he began to succumb to the diseases of fame, we see that
Pilar was also where he cursed his critics, saw marriages and
friendships dissolve, and tried, in vain, to escape his increasingly
diminished capacities.

Generally thought of as a great writer
and an unappealing human being, Hemingway emerges here in a far more
benevolent light. Drawing on previously unpublished material,
including interviews with Hemingway's sons, Hendrickson shows that for
all the writer's boorishness, depression, and alcoholism, and despite
his choleric anger, he was capable of remarkable generosity to
struggling writers, to lost souls, to the dying son of a friend.

We see most poignantly his relationship with his youngest son,
Gigi, a doctor who lived his adult life mostly as a cross-dresser, and
died squalidly and alone in a Miami women's jail. He was the son
Hemingway forsook the least, yet the one who disappointed him the
most, as Gigi acted out for nearly his whole life so many of the
tortured, ambiguous tensions his father felt.

Hendrickson's bold and beautiful book strikingly makes the case
that both men were braver than we know, struggling all their lives
against the complicated, powerful em